Should you kill bad guys in your dreams?
by phil on Friday Dec 2, 2011 11:26 AM
lucid dreaming
Should you kill bad guys in your dreams? Sure, why not? They're not alive right? Well, you really only have two bases for this belief. One is that in your dreams, you remember having woken up before from a similar loopy world. You remember being in a place where there is no evidence of a dream world anywhere. And so you think to yourself, "I'll snap out of this, and none of it will exist anymore, therefore it's not real." So, you're 100% confident you can take down muggers or whoever you want with no regret. After all, there will be no material consequences in your waking world.
The second basis is that your dream world is fantastical and subject to your imagination, further proof it's not real. But lets deconstruct that. Its fantastical relative to our waking world, but why should that lead us to favor the waking world more? Isn't a world that is rigidly governed by rules, like the laws of physics, more insane than one without. In fact, it drives physicists to insane deductions to try to make it all unify and fit together. It drives us religiously insanse because we look around and think, "Wow, look at this order and perfection, its got to have been designed by some infinite genius." And then we kill each other over who is more right about the true nature of this genius, when really we're masking our own insecurities about these conclusions.
Also, so what if our dreams are subject to our imaginations? That's just another way of saying they're subject to our will. But isn't our waking world also subject to our will in a way. What if there is more of our waking world that is subject to our will than our brains let us believe. What if we have a neurochemical process that dopes us into forgetting the true extent of our influence. Evolutionarily, that'd make sense, since it'd help us from feeling burdened by responsibilty and guilt.
So the next time you decide to stab those monsters in your sleep, think twice. Or wake up.
